


The Other Side of the Fulcrum

by selstarry



Category: Sān guó yǎn yì | Romance of the Three Kingdoms - All Media Types, Sān guó | Three Kingdoms (TV 2010), Three Kingdoms History & Adaptations - All Media Types
Genre: Conquest of Zhongyuan, Gen, introspective, slashier aspects are blink-and-you'll-miss-it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-18
Updated: 2012-12-18
Packaged: 2017-11-21 10:09:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/596483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/selstarry/pseuds/selstarry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To Sima Yi, love and fear are not so different.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Other Side of the Fulcrum

If Zhuge Liang had been any less of a foe, Sima Yi would have despised him.

There’s as much to loathe about the man as there is to love, he knows, and yet. That indefatigable, painful sense of greater duty, which by all rights he should find insufferable, somehow becomes worthy of admiration when seen from across the battlefield. That fondness for mockery stings in a different way when it’s a rare touch of humor, and almost warmth, from a man drained brittle and dry in the quest for his destruction.

(Sima Yi holds one resentment only, that where he must scheme and wait and discard his pride for the sake of power, Zhuge Liang has it handed to him. But he’s too self-aware to feel any real rancor; it would be pointless when he knows well enough that, even if he’d had the opportunity, he would never have given his allegiance to Shu.

Just look at Zhuge Liang, he thinks. For all Sima Yi’s own lords’ distrust and small cruelties (well-warranted, of course), at least they’d taught him to love carefully.)

Distance softens mountains to blue mist and enmity to... well, not quite affection. Respect, yes. Appreciation for a kindred spirit, shrouded by ideals and a condemned cause though it may be. Something balanced at the precipice between fear and love, that feels the cold winds of the former and the breathless heights of the latter.

After the two lords he has outlived, Sima Yi reflects, it is not so unfamiliar a sensation.


End file.
